If you follow his ideas strictly you can lose weight and have plenty of energy if you just keep the fat content up. Since starting a low carb diet my reps and endurance have gotten much better than when I was on a high carb diet. Many of the fighters that I train with have adpoted a similar type of diet.

Check out the body opus system as well. It bounces between low carb during the week and regular carb on the weekends. It gives you a bit of freedom in your eating as well as a bit of variety.

Also the only reason that people gain weight if they get off the diet is because they go back to overeating. No other reason.

Diet should be used in the same context of: In biology today we will study the black bears DIET.

After all folks, there really isn't anything better than a heavty grilled cheeseburger (without the bun of course) or a nice char-broiled steak with some good old vege's and a lovely salad!! mMMMMMM good!!

The Atkins plan is to eliminate refined sugar and refined flour. A good Atkins meal would be a chicken breast and a good size salad. There will be plenty of fiber in the salad. There is no reason to get your fiber from a bottle.
The salad will have lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, cucumbers, radishes, garlic, carrots..etc.
It should not have croutons, beans, or other starch sources.
Low-fat dressings are high in processed sugar. Avoid these. Use the standard dressings.
In his book atkins mentioned the diversity of individual metabolisms and said there would be some who would not be able to eat the high-fat version of his diet. These folks will need to watch both carb and fat intake.

Let's see, I'm 37 now so chicken and salad for the next 30 years or so....I could maybe manage the next 30 days or so but probably not 30 years.

Besides the Atkins diet is high in protein and FAT. Not just protein. So actually a good atkins meal would be to replace that chicken breast with a couple of steaks grilled and dripping with butter and wrapped in bacon. have some sausage on the side and put some ham, fried bacon, and boiled egg in that salad then you have a good Atkins meal.

I think the root of the problem is....

I think people are mixing up two different aspects of Atkins here. From what I've read, it starts in the induction phase (where you do indeed eat much, much meat and little else). This is supposed to last for two weeks, at most. After that, you go back to eating sensibly, just cutting out proccessed sugars and what they see as "bad" carbs.